Commentary on the article:

"GlaxoWellcome and MDL become entangled in the Web"

by John Hodgson, Nature Biotechnology14:690, June 1996.

In March, 1996, MDL made a sales presentation to Glaxo Wellcome's
major US research site in North Carolina. The presentation included
Chemscape Chime, which was derived in
part from the source code of RasMol, released as freeware by Roger
Sayle of GlaxoWellcome.
This drew the attention of GlaxoWellcome executives to RasMol,
previously a low visibility project at GlaxoWellcome.

Clarification of errors in the above article

As you can
now learn from MDL Information
Systems' website, this article is erroneous in stating that
Chime is "90% RasMol, 10% MDL", and in estimating that
MDL's contribution was "2-4 person-months" or the addition
of "just 1,000 lines or so of code to the 30,000-line RasMol
program". The facts
(verified by MDL staff) are that Chime (as of version 0.8,
concurrent with this article) was less than 20% derivitive of RasMol
source code (<16,000 lines, and that extensively reorganized,
optimized, converted from C to C++, and made re-entrant), and more
than 80% original with MDL (version 0.9a >68,000 lines; >80,000
lines prior to version 1.0), and that MDL's investment has exceeded
several person-years of programming time.

What may be deceptive to
the casual user is that much of Chime's menu interface and
appearance is very similar to that of RasMol. Clearly, Chime's user
interface and representations are strongly influenced by and
derivative of those in Sayle's RasMol, which is acknowledged.
However, the plug-in functionality of Chime required an extensive
infrastructure not present in RasMol. Also, Chime contains features
not found in RasMol, such as 2D representations, animations of XYZ
data files, hypertext button-controlled scripting, and the ability
to display multiple separate structures simultaneously (re-entrant
code).

In my opinion, the tone of this article is unfortunate in
dwelling upon the hostility, if any, between the two corporations.
One wishes that Nature Biotechnology could rise above this
type of journalism. More newsworthy and important is the fact
that each corporation has
made a laudable contribution to the research community, and
continues to do so. The August, 1996 press releases from MDL Inc. (see "What's New")
announce that Chime version 1.0 will be free to all users,
and that GlaxoWellcome and MDLI are collaborating on RasMol as well
as Chime.